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Reindeer game up

The species Rangifer tarandus is divided into seven subspecies, but all are in trouble, according to a survey of their status published in a recent paper in Global Change Biology. We’re talking about the animals that are usually called reindeer in Europe and caribou in North America. All across their circum-polar range their populations are undergoing an unprecedented synchronous decline (red denotes herds in decline in the map below, which I hacked from the BBC article quoted below, green indicates those on the increase and dark grey means no data is available).
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One subspecies — R. t. tarandus — comprises the semi-domestic and wild reindeer that live across northern Scandinavia and Russia and are so important to the Sami people and others. Here’s one of the authors quoted by the BBC on the causes of the decline:

“If global climate change and industrial development continue at the current pace, caribou and reindeer populations will continue to decline in abundance,” says Vors.

“Currently, climate change is most important for Arctic caribou and reindeer, while anthropogenic landscape change is most important for non-migratory woodland caribou.”

Interestingly, reindeer were recently re-introduced to Britain after a gap of 800 years. I guess their long-term future there must be in question.

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Bactrian camel a little less on the edge

Today’s BBC story about the unexpected birth of a Bactrian camel calf at Knowsley Safari Park in the UK reminded me how little I know about camels — although my performance on the camel question on the recent domestication quiz should have warned me. In particular, I didn’t know that there are wild Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus) in NW China and Mongolia, though admittedly they are down to about a thousand and endangered. It’s unclear from the Knowsley website whether the Bactrian camel birth is part of a captive breeding and re-introduction programme, but there are such programmes there for other species:

Our Pere David’s deer herd is one of the largest in the UK. These deer were classified as extinct in the wild until the mid 1980’s when a group of 39 deer went back to China as part of a project organised by the Zoological Society of London. Four of our deer formed part of this group returned to the 1,000 hectare Dafeng reserve. Now classified as critically endangered, they are protected from hunting on the reserve and the captive breeding herds such as ours at Knowsley are still very important to ensure the future of these deer.

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Database hell squared beckons?

Colleagues at FAO and Bioversity International have a paper out in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis entitled “Food composition is fundamental to the cross-cutting initiative on biodiversity for food and nutrition.” The cross-cutting initiative in question is that on biodiversity for food and nutrition which the CBD asked FAO to lead, in collaboration with Bioversity. And by the “food composition” of the title the authors mean databases which document the nutritional value of foods not just at the level of species, as currently, but of the different varieties and cultivars within species. These will in a way be a central pillar of the initiative. We’ve talked here before about the extensive variation that can exist among varieties in nutritional composition, for glycaemic index, say. And we’ve repeatedly highlighted the work of Lois Englberger and her Pohnpei colleagues in this field, for example. So it is good to hear that food composition tables and databases will be improved to allow the inclusion of infra-specific data. Populating the databases will be something else, of course. The data will need to come from existing genetic resources databases, which currently do not as a rule contain much in the way of this kind of information and are not necessarily equipped to handle it. So this initiative will involve a marriage between two database communities, that of nutritionists and that of genebanks. A difficult trick to pull off. Necessary, and long overdue, but difficult. Stay tuned.

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The politics of toddy

Coconut farmers receive Toddy Movement members released on bail.

That’s the intriguing title of a short piece from Tamil Nadu on the NewKerala.com website. It turns out that dozens of farmers had been thrown in jail a few days ago for tapping coconut toddy without the permission of the state government. The farmers claim that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi has reneged on an election promise to rethink the ban on toddy in force in the state. So they started tapping and selling the beverage in their fields in protest. The reaction seemed a bit heavy-handed to me, but apparently toddy is a bit of a political hot potato (as it were) in Tamil Nadu:

In Tamil Nadu, this beverage is currently banned, though the legality fluctuates with politics. In the absence of legal toddy, moonshine distillers of arrack often sell methanol-contaminated alcohol, which can have lethal consequences. To discourage this practice, authorities have pushed for inexpensive “Indian Made Foreign Liquor” (IMFL), much to the dismay of toddy tappers.

Last year the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Tamil Nadu government to prohibit the manufacture, sale and consumption of toddy in the state (there is no ban in other states). The Chief Justice explained the decision in part thus:

“it is a policy decision of the State government. There is no fundamental right to manufacture or trade in liquor. The problem with toddy is it affects ordinary people in villages. Whisky or other liquor is not easily accessible to the common man.”

So that’s allright then. Now, the statement made in an article in The Hindu a few years back about the consequences of the ban for rural livelihoods may be a bit exaggerated:

The Salem district unit of National Agriculturalists Awareness Movement (NAAM) staged a demonstration here on Friday asking the State Government to allow toddy tapping… They said the denial of toddy tapping had ushered in poverty in rural areas.

But toddy must represent a significant contribution to the income of thousands of farming families — and no doubt has done for generations. And the ban may well be contributing to the disappearance of specialized coconut types. Why replant and tend varieties favoured for toddy if you can’t make the stuff?

Go on, Chief Minister Karunanidhi: legalize it!

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Turning point, or dew on a leaf?

Elizabeth Finkel reports for Science from the 3rd meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Tunis last week. Here’s the bottom line:

In a remarkable and unexpected climax as the meeting drew to a close, the treaty governing body agreed to raise $116 million for a biodiversity fund that would support traditional farmers. That helped avert a crisis of confidence in the treaty, says Bhatti, who calls the meeting “a real turning point.” Worede, more circumspect, describes the biodiversity fund as a “little progress.” However, he says, “Anything voluntary is like the dew on a leaf: It can fall down at any time. The contributions should be binding.” 1